Opening Remarks by Senior Minister of State for Law and Transport Mr Murali Pillai SC at TechLawFest 2026

9 September 2026 Posted in Speeches

From Foundation to Frontier: The Turing Test and the Importance of Being Human

The Honourable Justice Aidan Xu, Justice of the Supreme Court of Singapore,

The Honourable Rony Govinden, Chief Justice of Seychelles,

The Honourable Sarah Sackman KC, Minister of State for Justice, United Kingdom

The Honourable Judith Collins KC, President of Law Commission of New Zealand

Your Excellencies and Honourable Justices,

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Introduction

1.             A very good morning to you, I am honoured to have this opportunity to make my address before you.

2.             This year’s theme is about the role of law “from foundation to frontier”.

3.             I am sure you will hear much over these two days about the Role of the Law itself. So, in this opening, I wanted to speak about the defining frontier of our generation; and its impact on our profession.

4.             As everyone is aware, today’s defining conversations are around artificial intelligence (AI).

5.             But, I submit to you, this is not, or at least should not be, the defining frontier for law. Instead, our frontier is, as it has ever been, a very human striving, for goodness against evil, meaning against caprice, and truth against falsehoods. Technology, including AI, is mere instrument in this. Goodness, meaning and truth. The law is a profession that takes aim at all three. Whether we hit our aim or not depends on, amongst others, everyone in this room. So, let me start with this and the foundation laid down for Singapore law 200 years ago. 

Singapore’s Foundation

6.             This year marks SGLaw200. 200 years since the Second Charter of Justice laid the foundations of the modern legal system in Singapore. That foundation, laid in 1826, has shaped the Singapore we know today.

7.             By that, I refer to our society, our markets, and our very own identity as a people. It is not history but “live” economic fact.

8.             Just last month, the Ministry of Trade and Industry upgraded Singapore’s 2026 GDP growth forecast to 4.5 to 5.5 percent, up from 2.0 to 4.0 percent, on the back of a stronger first half and accelerating AI-related investment.

9.             Investors betting on Singapore in this AI-driven cycle are betting not just on our economy, but on our way of life, how we decide right or wrong, just or venal. They are betting on our courts, contracts, and institutions.

10.          AI is the current chapter which we are writing together. It is changing our economy. It will also change our profession. This is where I would like to turn next.

The Meaning of Our Profession

11.          There is reason to be optimistic about what AI can offer the profession. 74% of professionals now use AI several times a week based on Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals Report. More telling, perhaps, is what professionals want AI to do for them. 52%, quite naturally, preferred a future where human expertise remains at the centre. AI handles the groundwork allowing professionals to focus “on judgment, relationships and strategic thinking” By the way, if the survey is to be trusted, there are 48% who preferred otherwise – which says something about themselves, or maybe the way the survey was carried out! I would like to think that all lawyers want our expertise to remain at the centre. And if so, this is the opportunity AI presents, to free up lawyers to focus on judgment, clients and more complex issues.

12.          So, my message to the profession is this: we can and should use AI deliberately and make the most of what it can offer. It is a technology, although different in power and type from all others in the past. It is the frontier in terms of technological change. This will help us confront our own frontiers – the very human frontier of pressures our lawyers face today.

13.          The Honourable Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon, speaking at the National University of Singapore (“NUS”) just last week, spoke candidly about the pressures weighing on young lawyers today. Rising complexity, deepening commercialisation, and a technology-driven erosion of the line between work and life.

14.          In a general way, this applies to the workplace at large, across professions. Workload, workplace culture, and the lack of mentorship comes up again and again.

15.          These pressures are not new. But they are more keenly felt by a generation coming into the workplace with more options, different exposures and new generational norms.

16.          A rising pressure too presses upon senior lawyers. Building a book of business while mentoring juniors. Keeping pace with regulatory and technological changes, while managing a team. And increasingly, keeping up with competition that has intensified since they themselves joined practice.

17.          What can technology do? A prima facie response would be to say that it is a productivity tool, something that creates additional capacity for us. Wolters Kluwer’s 2026 Future Ready Lawyer Survey found that 62% of legal professionals are already saving between 6% and 20% of their working week through AI.

18.          If AI can take first-pass research and first drafts off a desk, whether junior or senior, it can also take some of the grinding hours off a career, and return the time that judgment, mentorship, and sustainable practice, actually require.

19.          AI adoption may be a way to cut cost, but it equally can be seen as an investment in people – creating new capacities in a general-purpose technology.

20.          Just as new technologies have taken back-breaking manual labour in the past, so too can AI do the equivalent for us. This is common, trite knowledge. But let me take you to a very different philosophy of implementation.

21.          I had said that the defining frontier of law today is our human striving, for goodness, meaning and truth and that technology, including AI, is a mere instrument in this human striving.

22.          I focus here on “meaning” – what is the meaning for us, all of us in this room, in the practice of law?

Turing Test and digitalisation

23.          The British mathematician Alan Turing devised a test for machines, a test of deception. Suppose you typed questions into a machine and a human replies.  Suppose you do the same and a machine replies. Suppose you can tell them apart. Then the machine fails the Turing Test.

24.          If you cannot tell them apart, if the human response is identical to the machine, then the machine passes. You are deceived into thinking an artificial thing is human.

25.          We are striving to build ever more perfect machines. But we do this in vain if we forget the reason for striving.

26.          So let me bring it back to law and the implementation of digitalisation. We can use AI to make us more productive and to build capacity. But especially for new lawyers, if the struggle, the grind, the memorization, and eventually the ability to make sound judgements, come from human manual labour, from reading real cases rather than summaries, writing your own notes rather than having AI generate these from transcripts of recordings, from writing your own arguments - then do it. Take the hours, the days, the years. Developing judgment and legal acumen takes time, as a human, not an artificial endeavour.

27.          Doing this is not naïve, or Luddite or ignorant. It is what we do, when we pay close attention to the meaning of our profession. We harness words to construct human perception of fact, values and notions of right and wrong, good and bad. There is something less than human if we forbear this construction ourselves, and build a flimsy foundation justified in the name of efficiency, cost-reductions or worse, relying on the perceived notion of “being at the frontier of technology.”

28.          If being a good human lawyer requires us to train ourselves by sometimes doing what a machine can do (and probably does better and faster), then do it. This is especially so for young lawyers who may require the time to develop and mature. The journey towards meaning demands this.

29.          I realise that this exposes me to the risk of being anti-technology so I say this carefully – by all means, embrace technology, invest in it, train people to be fluent in it, but do so with eyes open; let us not run helter-skelter into it for fear of looking backward. Implementation must be adaptive and we as a profession must strike our own way.

30.          The Government has been strongly supportive of this intentional transformation.

31.          Let me highlight what we are already doing to create the right conditions.

32.          First, a direct word especially to the small and medium law firms here – sign up for the LIFT pilot. LIFT stands for “Legal Innovation and Future-Readiness Transformation” – My Ministry has been heavily promoting this programme and has even produced a nifty video starring several colleagues, including the Minister for Law, Mr Edwin Tong SC and my Director of Legal Technology Transformation Office, Mr Lim Joo Hong. We did this because we know that small and medium firms need support to identify and implement suitable AI tools. 23 firms have already come on board. The pilot run will close by the first quarter of 2027, so that we can assess how the programme has worked and how we can refine it further. So, if you are thinking about signing up, now is the time.

33.          Second, keeping our laws responsive to change more broadly, not just to the AI wave. The Ministry of Law (“MinLaw”) and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (“IPOS”) launched a public consultation on AI and intellectual property. Delving into, amongst other things, how copyright stays fit for purpose, as content is created differently. And how our patent framework keeps pace, as AI plays a larger role in invention.

34.          Third, providing clarity on AI capabilities where uncertainty is growing, to help law firms and legaltech providers make informed choices. The Infocomm Media Development Authority (“IMDA”) and Scale AI, a tech firm, with our support, have developed a benchmark for how well large language models actually understand Singapore law. They will publish the benchmark methodology paper with key findings in the next few months.

35.          And here is what is new, some of it as recently as today.

36.          First, supporting sustainable adoption more broadly. We will launch a new initiative, LegalTech OnDemand, or LTOD, this is a one-stop marketplace that brings together legaltech users, buyers, and providers. So that good AI tools are easier to find and cheaper to adopt. Join the mailing list if you are in practice. And come forward if you are a provider who wants to be listed on LTOD.

37.          Second, enabling responsible innovation. Tomorrow, right here at TechLaw.Fest, MinLaw and the Law Society of Singapore (“LawSoc”) will be hosting The Lion’s Pit. This is a legaltech innovation competition to tackle real industry challenges, which we launched as part of our LegalTech GoWhere effort with the Singapore Academy of Law (“Academy”).

38.          None of this works without people. I am heartened that the Academy will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (“MOU”) with the Institute for HR Professionals and the Singapore Mediation Centre, to support training and job redesign for legal professionals and paralegals amidst changes driven by technology and AI. This is important because a resilient profession needs to equip and support its people, not just digitalisation of firms.

39.          I am also encouraged by what our students are already showing us. Two teams of Singapore Management University (“SMU”) students performed strongly at the Cambridge LLM Law Hackathon this June. One of them clinched second place, against nearly 80 teams worldwide.

What it means to be a lawyer now

40.          Let me turn, finally, to a question I know every lawyer and every client in this room is asking: If AI can research, draft, and summarise faster than any one of us, what is actually left for me to do?

41.          If machines can pass the Turing Test, and clients cannot tell us apart from an AI Avatar, is there still room for me? My view is yes and here I give you, as a non-mathematician, my own take on the Turing test. AI strives towards passing the test, but the meaning of the test is a human one.

42.          Even in passing the test, they fail, because the Turing Test is a test of deception, and machines have no idea what deception is, no idea of good and evil. There is no morality in them.

43.          They strive towards perfection, without knowing what this striving is for, or understanding the imperfectness of humans. There is room of us all, as human lawyers, in the future, as it has been in the past. Room for all who keep ourselves abreast with new developments in law, including technologies in our practice, and AI is one competency, among several, that the lawyer of the future will need. We will need commercial judgment, cross-border fluency, negotiation. And we will need the very human skill of managing client relationships, especially under pressure. AI is the newest addition to that list, not a replacement for the rest of it.

44.          The Chief Justice’s view is one I share. The critical distinction is between assistance and responsibility. AI can assist us in our work. But it is the lawyer, not the tool, who remains answerable for what is filed, argued or advised. The human is to be blamed and credited, the human carries moral culpability.

45.          We have already seen, in courts around the world, including Singapore, filings that cited cases which simply did not exist, generated by AI and never checked before they were submitted. The tool did the work. The person was still the one who had to answer for it.

46.          That distinction, between what a tool can produce and what a person must answer for, is not a constraint on the profession’s future. In fact, that distinction is the profession’s future as it was in our past. Who answers for wrong and harm – this is not a question for a machine – it is, as it has ever been – our bread and butter (that’s another distinction between us and AI!)

47.          As information becomes abundant and nearly free, judgment becomes scarcer, and more valued.

48.          Clients will not pay a premium for what a machine can generate. They will pay however, for the lawyer with sound professional judgement to navigate not just legal, but also commercial twists and turns. That, in one form or another, has always been what it means to be a lawyer.

Closing

49.          As we mark SGLaw200, as we commemorate more than two centuries of legal history. And a profession that has continually evolved while remaining true to its purpose.

50.          Our legal profession prides itself on trust, on quality, on integrity, and on judgement.

51.          These qualities all contrive against the Turing Test. They have underpinned Singapore’s success for the past 200 years. They must continue to define us for the next 200 years.

52.          The frontier is not defined by technology but by human striving.

53.          Let us invest in ourselves, in our firms, and in the next generation.

54.          Let us recognise that even as we are today, at the frontier of new debates of what it means to be human, for law, it must still mean a striving towards goodness, meaning and truth.  These are the emblems of our profession; we must wear it proudly. And these are what make us fully human.

55.          Thank you.

Last updated on 9 September 2026